Crime Club

The Crime Club was an imprint of the Doubleday publishing company, which later spawned a 1946-47 anthology radio series and a 1937-1939 film series.  The imprint focused on publishing classic and popular works of detective and mystery fiction, including all 50 books of The Saint series by Leslie Charteris and the Fu Manchu series by Sax Rohmer. The Crime Club began life in 1928 with the publication of The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan and ceased publication in 1991, during which time it published 2,492 titles.

The Stars

The Crime Club radio series featured a rotating cast of actors, with each episode introduced by the series host, The Librarian, portrayed by Barry Thomson and Raymond Edward Johnson (who was better known as the host of Inner Sanctum Mysteries).

Key Dates

• The Crime Club radio series began on the Mutual Broadcasting System on December 2, 1946, and continued until October 16, 1947. Prior to this, stories from the Crime Club imprint were first dramatized on The Eno Crime Club, a detective series broadcast on CBS from February 9, 1931, to December 21, 1932.  
• The Crime Club novels were not adapted for the later Eno Crime Clues, which aired on the Blue Network from January 3, 1933 to June 30, 1936. 

Other Information

In 1937, Universal Pictures made a deal with Crime Club and was granted the right to select four of their yearly published novels to adapt into films.  Eleven films were made in this series between 1937 and 1939, with the first being The Westland Case, based on the Jonathan Latimer novel Headed for a Hearse. The unit responsible for these films was producer Irving Starr, with former film editor Otis Garrett often directing.

The Crime Club imprint and its associated radio and film adaptations helped to bring classic and popular mystery and detective fiction to a wide audience during the golden age of old-time radio and classic Hollywood cinema.